KEY POINTS:
Sir Harold Kroto has a low opinion of Rupert Murdoch. Ditto Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton products.
He's not particularly happy either about being called Sir Harold. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist, an "accidental' pioneer in the emerging field of nanoscience, is adamantly "Harry" - except when he's talking to the Queen.
Here for a series of lectures at Massey and Otago universities, Harry is adamant, verging on evangelical, about a lot of things - nanoscience is nothing new, the idea of God doesn't make any sense, patriotism and nationalism should be restricted to the cricket pitch, there is so much lunacy, ignorance and stupidity in the world that our only hope is education, and that people who bring creationism into the science curriculum "really piss me off"'.
His issues with creationists are canvassed in his Sir Neil Walters lecture at Massey University's Albany campus - a public presentation called "Architecture in NanoSpace". The problem with Murdoch et al is revealed earlier the same day to postgraduates at a seminar entitled "Science, Society and Sustainability".
Kroto was discussing the promise of cheap, flexible, featherweight organic solar cells, one of the many exciting - some would say over-hyped - developments in nanotechnology. These are solar cells made not from silicon, but mostly of organic molecules; that is, chemical compounds containing carbon.
"It looks as though Carbon 60 can raise the productivity of electricity from these organic cells by a factor of 5 to 10," says Kroto. But more efficient solar electricity is only part of the story. How this new type of solar panel is made - molecules literally printed on plastic like a newspaper printing press - brings mass production and perhaps makes cheap solar power viable.
"That would be fantastic. We could use this wonderful technology to do something more useful than Murdoch does with his newspapers."
Zealous about science-with-social-responsibility, Kroto seizes every opportunity, regardless of the tangential logic, to push a humanist position.
Carbon 60, aka Buckminsterfullerene, is his claim to fame. Its discovery in 1985 by Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley led to the trio getting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996. It also ushered in a new era of "caged compounds" and signalled the birth of nanoscience - the science of the extremely tiny, of things on an unimaginably small scale.
Or, as physicist Richard Feynman put it in 1959, "a staggeringly small world that is below".
While the word "nano" originally meant "dwarf" and has been used to describe small things - such as "Nanosaurus" for a dinosaur only a metre long, or, more popularly, the iPod "nano" Apple's smallest media player - neither comes close to just how small things are on nanoscale. Nano refers to a nanometre (nm) - a millionth of a millimetre. It is the measure of atoms - a world so minuscule it can only be seen with complex electron and scanning tunnelling microscopes.
As it happens, the C60 molecule, one nanometre in diameter, comprising interlocking hexagons and pentagons, and named after geodesic dome guru Buckminster Fuller, looks just like a soccer ball. Hence it, and its variants are also known as Buckyballs.
Kroto doesn't particularly like the "nano" categorisation, nor the connotation that the field is something novel. "It's not new. It's basically chemistry because chemists have always worked with nanoscale objects."
What gets scientists excited about this ultra diminutive world is that materials down below behave quite differently to the way they do up above. Nanomaterials can be stronger or lighter, or conduct heat or electricity in a different way. Or change colour - particles of gold can appear red, blue or gold, depending on their size.
The C60 discovery - which unexpectedly turned up after Kroto and his colleagues had vapourised graphite (pencil lead) with a laser beam - was a new form of carbon. "We started to understand graphite a lot better than we did before," says Kroto.
"People thought graphite wants to be flat. It doesn't. It wants to be closed. You start to realise it's a very messy problem as to what graphite is."
Kroto's messy problem has since spawned other "closed caged" nanoscale forms including cylindrical fullerenes known as nanotubes - tiny carbon straws usually only a few nanometres wide, but which can be up to several millimetres long.
As well as being extremely light and strong - 50 to 100 times stronger than steel - many have other surprising dynamic qualities. Some bounce like shock absorbers, others have rotating parts, and some (nanowires) are perfect tiny conductors.
Which opens all sorts of possibilities. An aeroplane built of such material could be so strong and yet so light that if the engines failed it would simply glide back to earth. But the promise is a long way from reality.
Scientists have yet to figure out how to make these super strong materials. "We really need to put 10 to the power of 15 of these nanotubes together," says Kroto. Like a box of straws, millions of nanotubes of the same diameter and hexagonally packed and glued together as one would be an incredibly strong structure. But creating one is yet to be achieved.
Kroto gives another example of a nano future - molecular computers with nanowires and transistors so small it should be possible to stuff the number crunching power of a supercomputer into a wristwatch.
Cue Powerpoint slide of a Calvin Klein wrist watch. "All Calvin Klein has to do is take this wristwatch which probably costs $3 and put "CK" on it and people are prepared to pay $50 for it - it's incredible," says Kroto.
"One reason why we're in a financial mess is this seemingly ridiculous thing that people are prepared to pay at least 10 times what some things are worth." Cue diatribe about a Louis Vuitton briefcase priced at $1000 and poverty in the world.
"How can a briefcase cost $1000? We've got to look at our values more carefully. Hopefully this crisis will bring some of us to our senses."
So what's his problem with Murdoch? "He has no ethics whatsoever. He's politically influential and he has no real social responsibility." Kroto appears visibly upset as he works himself up on the subject - tax avoidance and a description of Murdoch he's read somewhere.
"'An unscrupulous man in a spineless world', or something like that. I think that's the way it is - people kowtow to him. I want people to have social responsibility and I think our young
children deserve better... I don't want them to follow someone who has basically screwed the British taxpayer out of huge amounts of money by clever offshore investment ...Our kids need to have people with social responsibility as their icons not celebrities and I'm bothered about that."
Phew! The sort of people Kroto admires are people like Joseph Rotblat, the Polish physicist who stopped working on the Manhattan Project on the grounds of conscience - the only scientist on the atomic bomb project to do so. Rotblat was also a tireless campaigner against nuclear weapons and believed scientists should have their own code of moral conduct, akin to the Hippocratic Oath.
On that point then, does Kroto have concerns about nanoscience and in particular possible future use of C60? "I do feel a sense of responsibility this molecule is used for the benefit of the human race."
Should we be concerned about nanoparticles of titanium dioxide that have been added to some suntan lotions and cosmetics? Kroto says it's important to know that proper testing has been done on such products to ensure that the tiny particles do not penetrate the skin.
Likewise to find out whether there are toxic effects from free nanoparticles in the environment that could be inhaled, ingested or enter the body via the skin.
The problem however is that regulatory bodies are struggling to keep up with the science. And while nanoparticles are already on the market in cosmetics, paint and other coatings, the rules for testing them, in many cases have yet to be formulated.
What then of the "grey goo" doomsday scenario coined by American engineer Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation? The "eating the environment" scenario involved out-of-control, self-replicating nanobots consuming all matter on earth.
Silly sci-fi? Yes, but not completely silly. "We already have these small machines they are called viruses - they are already there," says Kroto. Fortunately, so far they don't seem to be eating the earth.
Kroto advocates proceeding with caution, but not to the extent that research stops - the argument being that science, as well as its mistakes, has also brought significant benefits such as anesthetics and penicillin.
He sees similar kinds of benefits ahead with nanotechnology, particularly in the development of "molecular machines" and self assembling systems.
"Molecular machines are nothing new. We actually have them already in our body," says Kroto. He's talking about enzymes like ATP synthase, the common energy currency and storage mechanism of cells which he describes as an "electric motor driven by protons." Or haemoglobin, the iron-containing oxygen-
transport protein in red blood cells - "a very sophisticated molecular machine able to grab and hold oxygen and also releases it when it's needed."
Their use in medical science could be far reaching. "It's about whether can we develop molecular machines with the sophistication of haemoglobin to go in and attack a cancer cell."
As Kroto points out, the machines like haemoglobin assemble themselves from a DNA blueprint, and he and other researchers are looking for ways to mimic nature's processes. Kroto's favoured definition of nanotechnology - "atom by atom, molecule by molecule assembly of a complex system" - incorporates the idea of nanomaterials assembling themselves from their components. The "bottom up" means of manufacture is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Already, carbon fragments, for example, can be induced to self-assemble into nanotubes.
But while the possibilities are there, nanotechnology has a long way to go before it delivers on its hype. Jaded observers say all we have so far is stain resistant trousers and better sunscreens.
Yes, Kroto agrees the promises of nanotechnology are "hyperflated" and their reality in everyday life is at least 30-40 years away. Meanwhile he'll keep working on finding ways to develop super-strong building blocks packed with social responsibility.
